Aspiring politician at center of policy

Cam SimpsonTribune national correspondent

In less than a year, Kris Kobach went from serving on a city council in Kansas and teaching law to the inner circle of policymaking at the Justice Department, where he was a principal architect of one of the most far-reaching immigration measures since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Now the 37-year-old is back in his hometown of Overland Park, Kan., and teaching again at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He's also running for a Republican nomination to Congress, campaigning on the work he did during his 22-month stint for Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft.

"I think most people who worked with him on the council understood almost immediately that his real interest was not in being on the City Council," said Republican Ed Eilert, Overland Park's mayor for 22 years.

Kobach, a law school professor with degrees from Harvard, Yale and Oxford, won election in the upper-middle-class Kansas City suburb of about 160,000 people in April 1999. Within about a year, Kobach ran unsuccessfully in the GOP primary for the Kansas Senate.

A year after that, in 2001, he resigned his City Council seat to take a White House fellowship, a highly competitive, yearlong program for professionals with promise. The non-partisan program allows fellows to see the system from the inside. Alumni include Secretary of State Colin Powell.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just 10 days into the program, Kobach and his classmates were getting on a bus for a retreat in Virginia when cell phones started ringing. The national crisis would shape the experience of everyone on the fellowship.

For Kobach, the crisis was an opportunity to get directly involved in making policy.

Brainstorming sessions led to the idea for a registration program when Kobach and others realized that all 19 of the hijackers entered the U.S. on valid visas, "and there was no system in place to check up on them," Kobach said during a recent interview in his Kansas City office.

Ashcroft announced the plan in June 2002, with a speech that Kobach said he helped write.

Seeking authority to implement the domestic phase of the registration program, the Justice Department reached back to little-used provisions first adopted in 1940 under the Alien Registration Act, which was passed on the eve of America's entry into World War II. More than 5 million foreign visitors to the U.S. were registered then without regard for nationality.

But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and in the name of national security, the Justice Department conducted a special registration of "enemy aliens," aimed mostly at Japanese, which officials said would help them take whatever measures were necessary, including internment.

During the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-80, there was another domestic registration--this one aimed at aiding in the expulsion of Iranian students. It was designed to apply pressure to end the siege of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

The registration program that Kobach helped craft mandated that men from 24 predominantly Muslim nations and North Korea report to government offices so they could be fingerprinted, photographed and questioned. More than 83,000 did so. The government subsequently moved to deport 13,740 of the men because of alleged immigration violations discovered during the interviews.

The power exercised in the most recent domestic registration was extraordinary, but Kobach said it was necessary and that nationality had to be used because of scarce resources.

The Justice Department said it is not uncommon for fellows to be given such significant responsibilities. Officials liked Kobach so much that he got an appointment from Ashcroft when his fellowship was over. Kobach said he stepped up because the events of Sept. 11 "demanded government action, and the government only moves quickly when individuals exert unusual effort."

He said he had no idea he was going to run for Congress when he worked on the registration program. Still, his slogan is: "A stronger Kansas. A safer America." On his brochure, Kobach tells voters, "As Counsel to Attorney General John Ashcroft, I worked daily to secure America's border against terrorists and to remove those terrorists already on American soil."